A recent Board of Education meeting brought up the subject of homework again. This rears its head every 5 to 10 years. Usually there is discussion for a while, mostly complaints: There’s too much homework. Why does my child have to do school work at home when they have finished 6 hours of work in school? There’s not enough homework. Vacations are for families, not for schoolwork. My child spends 4-5 hours a night on homework. Homework looks just like busy work. Does the teacher even look at what they are assigning?
Occasionally after discussions, surveys are taken, sometimes decisions and policies are made and then we wait another 5 to 10 years until the topic comes up again with a new set of parents.
As a teacher I always had a different take on homework. I must note that I’ve always taught elementary students through 6th grade; I was the sole provider of academic work and homework, which is different from the concerns of Middle and High School parents, where teachers from different classes all assign homework with little knowledge of what other teachers have assigned. For me the expectation was that I had to give homework. Homework was supposed to be an extension of the class work that we were doing. Early in my teaching it was difficult to come up with homework since I felt that most of the things I taught worked better when I was there to mediate. There were other subjects that I didn’t feel was as prioritized to focus on which I was mandated to teach and give as homework. One principal said to me if I give homework in certain areas, even though I didn’t want to, it would appease the parents and thus allow me to do other things that I wanted to do that might have more resistance. This actually worked out to be a good philosophy; only I didn’t use it as a way to appease parents as much as I did to appease my administrator. I had the range of parent complaints of there is too much to there is too little homework (on the same assignments).
